Old Buildings on the Darro, Granada by David Roberts, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: This week IFP p...

Jay from JaysTwoCents had an impromptu chat with Steve from our local Australian Hardware Unboxed channel where they discussed a bunch of issues around modern PC building, or lack thereof thanks to the proliferation of “AI” investors and their unprofitable, all-encompassing activities. This lead them to remember what they considered the golden age for the hobby. I will never miss the opportunity to wax lyrical about old and retro computers here! This also concerns a part of my own tech...

Hello, Good news today Circuit network Klonan We have several more circuit network improvements to share with you today. Boiler/Heat exchanger circuit connection The Boiler type entities can now be connected to the circuit network, which makes it super easy to set up backup or emergency power conditions. You will also notice the beautiful new Heat exchanger graphics and working animation by Zsolti. Land mine Land mine was less o...

“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry AI gives us an unprecedented ability to add. The danger is that we begin to mistake accumulation for value. Delivery is only the beginning (or be mindful of catabolic collapse) Every new system and feature adds obligations: it must be operated, secured, monitored, documented, integrated, upgraded and eventually replaced or retired. Hac...

I maintain SumatraPDF on GitHub. People fork it and make their own changes. I want to know which forks are active and what they’re working on. GitHub has a Network tab for this. I find it lousy. It’s hard to see active forks at a glance. Panning and zooming the UI is slow and fiddly. I just want a sorted list of forks with actual changes. So I wrote a small script: github-active-forks.ts . What it does It uses the GitHub API to find forks that have ahead c...

WASHINGTON (June 17, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense technology company building the world’s best autonomous solutions and next-generation aircraft, has been awarded a production contract by the U.S. Air Force to implement Hivemind mission autonomy software for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.   The production award reflects the Air Force’s software-first approach to autonomy and its decision to evaluate mission autonomy as a standalone capability within the CCA program....

Anubis is about to get WebAssembly-based proof of work checks so that administrators can use a non-SHA256 proof of work method to protect their websites. Part of the implementation goals of this work is that the check logic is defined in one place on both client and server. The client and server will then hook into the WebAssembly in order to make sure they're running in lockstep. However, one small problem comes up. What do you do when the client has WebAssembly disabled? I really...

I might have mentioned before that I've been slowly working through the Simple tutorial for building a Sea of Nodes compiler. A lot of it is still sort of going over my head but I've learned a couple of interesting things in the process of working through it that I think I can bring back to a query planning context. One thing I learned from it is that my understanding of Hash Consing was a bit myopic. Or incomplete. I have always thought of hash consing as a way to turn value equality in...

A developer desk setup decides how the next ten hours feel. Screen real estate, posture, and input gear shape focus more than software ever will. Most coding desk setup guides put the keyboard first. Working programmers usually find the screen and chair matter more. Here are the priorities, gear choices, and layout ideas that hold up in practice. Priorities that shape a developer desk setup Order matters when building a programmer desk setup. Spending $400 on a mechanical ...

I was listening to Late Night Linux 390 during my evening walking with the pooches tonight, and they were talking about (among other things) Kagi search . I've tried Kagi myself, but ultimately cancelled my subscription as I didn't really see the point in paying for it when I could get similar results with DuckDuckGo . This isn't because DDG or Kagi are inherently bad, it's because no matter which service you use, the web has been SEO'd to within an inch of its life, so we're fucked ei...

Once upon a time in march 2026 mimi hehe that event was interesting - exciting starts but I do find it a bit weird when people say "The Al did this", "the robot told me" and " it works with the Humans" Jess's talk was most interesting to me mimi Jess's talk was most interesting to me chee yes LOVED this, did i tell you i asked her to submit a demo some days pass mimi it happened again! "Claude did this", "me and Claude" is everyone always consciously making a little joke when...

Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how… Source Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many bio...

In April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, evap leak, & tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanic’s, combined with a delayed shipment. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 I was riding back in a tow truck. In April my car was in the shop three times. It was suppo...

On January 16, 2026, an impossible bug was solved. A bug in a library downloaded over a billion times every year, with a wall of comments asking for help, several hacked-together workarounds, and an open call to the entire internet to please try to solve it. A bug that had been open for 15 years, languishing as the oldest open issue on the project’s GitHub, predating its migration to GitHub even, because it had stymied every person who had tried to tackle it. I myself had already spent a full ...

Last week I saw a talk by Northwestern professor Nina Wieda on the history of the Silk Road , a network of trading routes across Asia active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. I knew of the Silk Road but was surprised by how much it used and fostered various technologies.  It started with a technology that allowed for traveling long distances with limited access to water, better known as a camel. Travel was slow, it could take nearly two years to get from one end (modern d...

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B Qwen 3 MOE , as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder across a lot of different system setups like raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI llama-cpp-python Ollama llamafiles and LM Studio Where are local models now? Early on, models were slo...

This post develops my thoughts on the theme of home that I first explored with focus in Home . You may appreciate reading Home before continuing to read this post. Whenever people ask me where I live, I have, for so long, spoken about the proximity to the city, knowing that Edinburgh is a place whose name people know. Earlier today, though, I realised that I shouldn’t necessarily define where I am in relation to another place: such phrasing can be helpful for direction, to help orient, but no...

Gentle A gentler world begins in the way you touch your heart. Be soft with the light inside you. Caress your body with this breath. God is nothing else but the place where the sun comes up in your chest. You are the glimmering destination. You are the golden honey daubed on the bread of the ordinary. Whatever is perfect, whatever is heavenly, begins here. — Fred LaMotte Do not bargain to be loved.  Do not negotiate.  When love is withheld as a punishment, as a manip...

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps , with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what , but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why . The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to run read-only SQL queries against data in Datasette, and can run write queries too ...

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected. As I wrote in a previous post , I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before official...

Go 1.27 is getting a goroutine leak detector in runtime/pprof . The proposal was accepted in April. A few common goroutine leaks # A goroutine leaks when it blocks on a channel or lock that nothing will ever release, so it lingers for the life of the process. I’ve been using uber-go/goleak to catch them in tests. One is an early return that strands a sender, which I covered in Early return and goroutine leak . It looks like this: func run ( tasks [] func () error ) ...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Regulation Works How Change Happens AI Happens Bibliography · Glossary · A Note on LLMS A lot of people are afraid that AI is going to take their jobs. That fear is legitimate...

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based search to an intelligent research assistant capable of answering complex questions and drafting regulatory documents. more… One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have...